I am trying to backup my computer to a shared hosted web server and so
it seems my only option is to mount it as an NFS. Why is "Using a
network filesystem" not recommended? Is there any other alternative?
Since it is a shared hosted service, I don't think I will be allowed
to install rsnapshot directly on the server. I am using bluehost and
have access to ssh.

If you use the rsync protocol to talk across the network, or you use
rsync-over-ssh, then rsync "knows" that the other end is across a
network connection. This means that when it's checksumming files it
will read the files locally at each end, calculate the checksums, and
then only transfer the results across the network.

If you use a network filesystem, then it can't tell the difference
between local and remote filesystems, and to calculate the checksums
for the remote files it has to read the files over the network, which
can generate huge amounts of network traffic and be slllloooowwwww.
Across a LAN (especially a small home network with few users) this isn't
so much of a problem, but over the public internet it will still work
but can be painful.

If you can ssh to your remote machine, then maybe you will be able to
install rsnapshot - you can always install it in your home directory.
And if you can't set up cron jobs there, then you can do that on
another machine and have that run 'ssh user < at > remotehost rsnapshot ...'.

--
David Cantrell | Official London Perl Mongers Bad Influence

In this episode, R2 and Luke weld the doors shut on their X-Wing,
and Chewbacca discovers that his Ewok girlfriend is really just a
Womble with its nose chopped off.